Future Education #1
Recently, I join a course from coursera named Future Education. It’s a lecture from University of London. The output from the first-week course is about writing the review about what I've learned and reflected on it. So let’s start!
The topic in this first week is about “How do we learn?”. They emphasize that we cannot accept one method about how do we learn. Our learning is affected by our culture (educational culture within a state). Beyond that, there are 4 purposes of learning, those are learning to know, learning to be, learning to do, and learning to live together. Unfortunately (for me), lots of the country cannot afford the educational system include these four purposes. As we know, the education system facilitates students to study in the classroom. We cannot afford to get those four purposes if only we study in the classroom. So, that’s why maybe we feel that the education system cannot fulfill human beings need to grow holistically as a human.
I’ve been thinking about this issue since I was in senior high school. I live in Indonesia, specifically in Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta is quite a high level in education quality but still, I felt that I cannot develop entirely as a human with this status quo of the education system because it only reaches my cognitive, not too much affect my emotional side. After I join the course, I realize that the education system problem is not only a problem in my country, but it occurs around the world.
When we talk about the learning process, there are two approaches, those are the traditional approach and progressive approach. Traditional views the human brain as a computer. A blank brain system is inputted by something by the event then it will produce an output of knowledge so that that person has already known something. But, this approach ignores that lots of other things are going in the brain, and those are emotions and the mental things that can affect the transformation of brain while processing the new event. The second one is denying that everybody will learn the same thing, rather it depends on what a human already has and how he/she processes in that situation. This approaches inline with a constructivist view of learning theory, while the first one is behavioralist, who emphasizes the changing of behavior as an indicator of a learning process.
With this new knowledge for me, I realize that maybe the dissatisfaction of how I developed in school is because of the difference of view of me and the status quo of the education system at that time. I realize that Indonesia is in the transition between the traditional approach to the progressive one at that time. Indonesia has already applied the “Kurikulum 13" curriculum, which includes affection and emotion thing as an assessment indicator. But, the problem is the change of mindset is not parallel between the top decision-maker and the bottom one, such head of education department each province and city, and also the teacher. This implied to the disconnected between the goals of the curriculum and the implementation.
